


Masks and Mirrors

by Pteryxcat



Category: Leverage
Genre: Acting, Autism, Autistic Parker, Autistic Sophie Devereaux, Canon Autistic Character, Character Study, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Other, Parker Being Parker, just a bit of Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-03
Updated: 2016-10-03
Packaged: 2018-08-19 07:26:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 523
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8195872
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pteryxcat/pseuds/Pteryxcat
Summary: Sophie is autistic, and is very good at hiding it. Parker is also autistic, and doesn't see the point of hiding it at all.





	

Acting always came easy to her, around other people. She echoed them, was who and what would work best in reaction to them, and it made her feel safe. On the stage it was different: the people were far away, impassive, and when she projected a personality it was swallowed by the crowd as though her mirror had turned into mud, and she fell apart, carefully-learned gestures and speech patterns turned to garish caricatures that, lacking a mirror, she couldn't see. 

Strangers were safe. Strangers and marks never knew she wore masks, and when one slipped around them she always had one underneath that was easy to bring up: the undercover agent, the cheating lover, the lies she made up ahead of time and layered so she would have something to fall back to. But crews, people she worked with, people who knew of her masks and saw her switch between them... They would start noticing the flickers around the edges of the masks that she switched so easily, start noticing she always wore a mask, start suspecting that she was made of masks and didn't have anything underneath them. And then they would know her, but they wouldn't understand. So she worked alone, or in one-job crews, never staying with people long enough for them to notice the slips. 

And then she joined the leverage crew, and for the first time she didn't want to leave. She LIKED who she was with them. She liked them, and the work was so challenging, more interesting than the small jobs she'd taken or invented before. So she stayed for another job, and then another, and then just one more, and then she realized that her masks were slipping, had been slipping for a while, and everyone was okay with it because they liked her, and were okay with her being who she was. 

And there was Parker. 

Sophie knew she was different, that most people had something under their masks to fall back on. She'd never met anyone with as many masks as she had, but she'd also never met anyone who didn't have ANY masks. At first, she was concerned. She thought Parker might not know how to make masks, so she taught her some of her favourite tricks, and sure enough Parker used them. But she only put them on for the con. Parker dropped her masks as soon as she could find an out, and out of sight of a mark she wouldn't put them on, didn't see the point of putting them on, for shopping or girl's night or anything. And slowly, Sophie realized that Parker didn't actually WANT any masks, that she saw the point of them and would use them if needed, but far from being unable to wear them she simply didn't want to, didn't find them comfortable. And that made Sophie wonder about some of her own masks, whether she needed them all, and she went on to experiment in doing things by herself and eventually was able to open up enough to let Nate in... But you know how the rest of that story goes.

**Author's Note:**

> This is definitely not autobiographical. At all. Nope.  
> I've been thinking about masks and affected personalities and typical female expressions of autism a lot lately...


End file.
